VIII. Jazz Concertos, Cool Jazz, Modern 1954-1962

VIII: Jazz Concertos, Cool Jazz and Modern (1954-1962) As the year of 1954 began, most people probably didn’t have a clue that this would become, in the long view of history, the demarcation line between the rock ‘n’ roll era and “everything else” in the history of popular and jazz music. The handwriting had been on the wall for some time anyway; with the exception of the Dorsey Brothers, who hated bop and refused to play it, nearly every other jazz musician of the time, even Count Basie and Benny Goodman, had a flirtation with it and some went into it full tilt. And then after bop came “modern jazz,” an umbrella term that seemed to cover everything from Monk, Mingus and the Brubeck Octet to Miles Davis, the MJQ and Sauter-Finegan. White middle-class America re- treated into the easy-to-understand music of pop singers like Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Doris Day and Patti Page; black America gravitated towards R&B. For some there was also country and western, but with the exceptions of Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold, these performers seldom crossed over into the mainstream hit parade. But 1954 brought Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, and even though it really didn’t become a huge hit until it was featured in the movie Blackboard Jungle the following year, it made a convenient demarcation line between older-styled pop music and the new breed. Of course there had to be a precedent that would allow a record like this to find its way into the pop market, and that pivotal disc was Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ Sixty Minute Man (1951), which not only made it to #1 on the R&B charts but, more surprisingly for a disc of such music at that time, made it to #17 on the Billboard Hot 100, normally the arbiter of white America’s music. A precedent had been set, however, and the trend was continued when white singer Johnny Ray began charting with a vocal style obviously based on African- American models. Of course, jazz musicians paid this trend no heed. They had long since abandoned the goal of charting hits; their aim now was to produce the best jazz, regardless of whether or not it sold a lot of records. All of this was good for the art form, but bad for jazz’s financial health. The public gravitated towards any jazz that had some semblance of a melody they liked or a beat they could follow, which gave such artists as Errol Garner, George Shearing, the MJQ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet a leg up on their more innovative brethren. Former stars of the late swing era such as tenor saxists Zoot Sims and Stan Getz, trumpeter- bandleader Shorty Rogers and even Duke Ellington suddenly found themselves fêted. By this time, too, jazz finally entered an American university. Marshall Stearns (1908- 1966), an English professor from Hunter College who had played drums while in his teens, offered Rutgers University the opportunity to access his huge collection of jazz recordings, books, magazines, sheet music and clip files, since there was nowhere else interested students or anyone else in America could do research about jazz. At first, then, the Institute of Jazz Studies was Stearns’ huge Manhattan apartment at 108 Waverly Place, but in the year he died Stearns negotiated to have the materials physically moved to the Rutgers campus to be housed. The first seminars on jazz were given at Rutgers in 1953 by a surprisingly large number of famous jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but for years it was not necessarily a place where playing jazz was taught. That was to come later. The end of the pre-rock era saw at least one complete loss to jazz. Pianist-composer Mel Powell (1923-1998), “fed up” with jazz, studied at Yale with Paul Hindemith from 1948 to 1952. Except for a few recording sessions through 1955, he gave up jazz for classical com- position but had little interest in fusing the two kinds of music. He was, rather, more interested in electronic and aleatoric compositions. One noted jazz critic, visiting Powell at his apartment around 1960, found him concentrating on the static patterns or “snow” that oc- 166 curred on early TV when a station went off the air. Powell claimed to find a great fascination in the moving patterns of the “snow,” and wanted to apply them to his music. When the critic asked him if he would return to jazz, Powell said, sarcastically, “Jazz! Who needs it?” Powell did return briefly to jazz in 1987, playing on the cruise ship SS Norway with Benny Carter, Milt Hinton and Louis Bellson, but he was never involved in the quest to combine jazz and classical. The lone anomaly in his output was Bouquet (1954), something of a swan song for him, which he recorded with trumpeter Ruby Braff and drummer Bobby Donaldson. Boutique alternates between Third Stream music and jazz, its middle section swinging while its opening and close are much more formal. The performance gives us a little window on what may have transpired had Powell kept one foot in the jazz camp. One of the most remarkable—and least commented-on—events in music history took place at Lewisohn Stadium in New York on July 14, 1956. Louis Armstrong, a lifelong oppo- nent of formal structure in jazz though he led a big swing band for a decade and greatly ad- mired the bands of Ellington, Goodman, Basie and Miller, had apparently long harbored a de- sire to play with a symphony orchestra. Not being versed in the classics and embarrassed at not being able to learn to play them, he had to wait until some enterprising soul could meet him halfway. That enterprising soul was Leonard Bernstein, who agreed to have a concert arrangement made of W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues in which Armstrong could play a cadenza and a solo, followed by interchanges between the symphony orchestra and Armstrong’s sextet, the All-Stars. Among the reasons why the event was underplayed were that this was not a classical piece—the “symphonic” arrangement of St. Louis Blues was even described by conductor Bernstein as an “overblown, artificial imitation” of what Armstrong did naturally—and be- cause it was given at a pops concert. On the surface it would be easy to agree with these is- sues and dismiss the performance as inconsequential. But listening to it reveals a number of trends that, though in nascent form, are quite interesting and applicable to possible future en- deavors in a more developed vein. For one thing, arranger Alfredo Antonini’s writing for the orchestra, and particularly the strings, has them bending notes and playing in a remarkably jazzy style that no other symphony orchestra of the period came close to. For another, Arm- strong’s cadenza, though somewhat tentative and simplistic, is more classical than jazz in form. And for another, the sections alternating the orchestra with the sextet really do swing, in a manner as natural as it is surprising. In short, it works, better than some of the hybrids that emerged during this era. Before getting into some of the more interesting and productive trends of this era, a few isolated successes must be commented upon. Gerry Mulligan who, as we noted in the last chapter, contributed some fine scores to the Thornhill band (as he later did for the Miles Davis nonet and Stan Kenton’s orchestra), recorded a marvelous piece in 1957 titled Revelation. Mulligan had been interested in jazz with structure for most of his career, had already written a little jazz fugue for his famous pianoless quartet titled Funhouse, but with Revelation he created a 12-bar tune structure that was not a blues, but rather a canon-like tune with a strange four-bar release in the center in contrasting rhythm. This tune then leads into a series of solos, beginning with Mulligan himself, which are true variations on the theme and thus create the feeling of a continuous piece. This is, in fact, reinforced by a variant of the opening melody which appears immediately after the alto sax solo, at 1:59 into the piece which, it turns out, is a chase chorus between the ensemble and the alto. Mulligan was to write many fine jazz pieces over the years, particularly Blue Port for his concert jazz band, but Funhouse and Revelation come closest to the genre we are exploring; and, apparently, just for fun, the penul- timate chorus is a fugue. 167 Much further out, however, are two scores written by Eddie Sauter after fleeing the collapsed Sauter-Finegan Orchestra for Germany in 1957. At the Donaueschingen Jazz Festi- val that year, Sauter unveiled two superb pieces, Kinetic Energy and Tropic of Kommingen. The first of these is something of a fugue for rhythm section, particularly a bongo drum and tambourine, that grabs one’s attention as it becomes more and more complex towards the end, while Tropic of Kommingen sounds for all the world like a Sauter-Finegan score that RCA simply wouldn’t let them record. Like the pieces mentioned in the last chapter, it uses similar orchestration in addition to contrasting rhythms and harmonies to create tension, then releases that tension with a swinging trumpet interlude, followed by a development section played by xylophone with trumpets (both open and muted). Eventually the trumpets play against themselves in contrasting rhythms until the tempo decreases and the brass pounds the climax.

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